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Short Story Game #1: The Secret Sharer (Part B: Analysis)

Short Story Game #1: The Secret Sharer (Part B: Analysis)

The narrator of Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” is an older seaman recalling his youth. What a 21st Century reader will perhaps find most striking about this 1909 tale is how credulous the narrator is, without the author giving any hint that we are to disbelieve this credulous narrator. The thrust and beauty of the story relies upon the worthiness of Leggat; otherwise the ending loses its thrust and beauty: “yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.” I suppose, the whole story could be reinterpreted much more sinisterly: Leggat, in this alternative reading, is actually guilty of an unforgivable crime that justice, decency, and the stability of the common weal demand we humans try before a judge a jury; and the captain’s close identification with Leggat blinds him from doing the right thing and turning him in–or at the very least, the captain’s willingness to put the ship and his shipmates at risk in order to bring his double a little closer to shore, is the act of a crazed and ultimately morally wrong mind. It is hard to believe Conrad meant the story to be anything like that. But how to tell? What makes me so sure Conrad wanted the readers to accept the narrator’s understanding of his actions as justified and his friend’s escape a good worth risking everything for?

The only fully sympathetic characters are the narrator and his double. Everyone else is portrayed as having some serious deficiency. The first mate is a gossipy, busy-bodying old coot–harmless enough, but not able to detach himself from his catch-phrase “Bless my soul, sir! You don’t say so!” and self-import (solver of mysteries with a knowing finger on his nose) to be fully self-aware. The very young second mate is taciturn, given to slouching, without any apparent spark of courage, fortitude, insight. The steward a simpleton, easily flustered. Upon introducing Captain (perhaps) Archbold, the narrator immediately declares: “A spiritless tenacity was his main characteristic, I judged.” And nothing in the rest of the story makes that reading seem incorrect. The man seems overwhelmed by the trauma of the events, unable to see the ambiguities within the murder-or-accident that the narrator so easily grasps, and seems obsessed with the idea of bringing this young man to justice–a young man he himself admits he never liked. And what reason does he give for not liking this young man? The young man is gentlemanly, but he is a plain man. What are we readers to do? Revolt against the well-educated and thoughtful narrator whose inner voice is so vivid? Who wants to turn down the narrator and take up the surrounding oafs whose inner lives are not part of the story? I don’t want to. Would I if I thought myself a simple man beleaguered by flashy gentlemen that know how all the science of my trade and how to act in public and have even read books and had thoughts, but that for all that–perhaps because of all that?–don’t really know how to work with real people like myself and my shipmates? Something like that must be (so-called) Archbold’s prejudice. But if we accept his view of things, then how ugly and gross the narrator and his friend and “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny” become; but none of those things seem ugly and gross. Both the narrator and his double seem sane (note the narrator’s humble and self-aware initial trepidation at his sudden captainhood) and decent enough and the murder really could be interpreted as an accident within a fair fight. Conrad does not give us a good reason to throw the narrator over and side with Captain Archbold and his hand-wringing, more-legalistic-than-good morality. And he even allows this early-story confirmation of the beauty of the straight-forward: “And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.” Again, that could be taken as evidence that the captain is himself just as unable to grasp the opposite side of the ambiguity (the one that Captain Archbold had dogmatically clung to, just as our captain dogmatically clings to Leggat’s version), but the general flow and the clear-eyed sanity of the narration work against such an interpretation, as does the beauty of the statement, whereby we know that we are hearing a sound man and that the author loves him and his thoughts.

Nowadays you couldn’t write this story like this. People wouldn’t accept it. They’d have to wag their fingers and exult in their own ability to catch nuances that the author seemed to plow right over like a solid ship moves over the slight turbulences of calm water. They wouldn’t allow Conrad to get away with what he seems to have gotten away with: an adventure tale, clear good guys, no particular villains except the general uninspired gossipy nonsense of the dead mass of humanity, and an unambiguously happy ending. At the very least, we have to protest the danger the narrator put his shipmates in! And for what? To make it a little easier on another version of himself? For what is the secret sharer to him but a perfect picture of what a man like himself could become with just slightly changed outward circumstances.

Well, we may fuss at the edges, but the story rolls on, and it’s a pretty good one.

Look at this though: “I wonder they didn’t fling me overboard after getting the carcass of their precious shipmate out of my fingers.” And there we see a kind of gentleman’s contempt for the lower class, which the narrator does not question, but did Conrad see a little twist of indecency within it? These are manly, heroic men, they charge forward while the incompetents misconstrue and mangle whatever they’re entrusted with. Maybe we nowadayers are right to read this story with a touch more ambivalence than it was probably originally invested with, but our morality and insight is also more limited than we know; where that not the case, we would be wise and live well.

Some themes: old vs young / impulsive vigor vs calculating caution; madness caused by secrecy and its forced separation from the shared narrative; understanding a stranger because they are essentially like you while not understanding more familiar people because they are essentially different [editor’s note: my dogma does not permit me to accept the accuracy of this idea–at least not when taken to the extremes of us vs them compassionlessness]; a captain and his ship, with the latter ideally a seamless extension of the former;
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About the Short Story Game: The idea is to read classic short stories, outline and analyze them, and then write a story response.

Author & Editor: What Ever

Copyright: Andrew Mackenzie Watson 2017, all rights reserved. Please do not reproduce the content of this website without written consent of the copyright holder.

Short Story Game #1: The Secret Sharer (Part A: Synopsis)

Short Story Game #1: The Secret Sharer (Part A: Synopsis)

Author: Joseph Conrad
Setting: A ship in the Gulf of Siam (now Thailand)
The story was written in 1909. And the simultaneous existence of steam-powered tugboats and sailing ships makes it seem reasonable to suppose the story is set somewhere around that time.

Characters:
The narrator/captain: a young Conway man (meaning he’d trained on the merchant navy school ship the HMS Conway, which was active from 1859 to 1953). He is a good writer and very capable of descriptions both detailed and poetic. He is recalling an event early in his career. His first command.
The first mate:Th older, with outlandish whiskers, taken to ferreting out mysteries (example: how that scorpion got into his inkwell; why that large ship loomed still so far from shore). A bustler-about and given to shouting “Bless my soul, sir! You don’t say so!”, a bit of a gossip and busy-body.
The second mate: younger even than the captain; quiet; given to unsailormanly lolling–or at least caught once in such indulgences.
The Steward: I don’t know if he’s a nervous character or just the constant ordering about from the captain makes him skiddish. He’s described once as “innocent”
The rest of the crew: Not developed. A mass of men who do what they are told.
Leggatt:A Conway a couple year’s younger than the ship’s captain. Same basic physical size of the captain (the other’s sleeping suit fits him and the captain often notices that, with the face obscured, they look like the same person). “He had rather regular features; a good mouth; light eyes under somewhat heavy, dark eyebrows; a smooth, square forehead; no growth on his cheeks; a small, brown mustache, and a well-shaped, round chin. … A well-knit young fellow of twenty-five at most.”
Captain Archbold & His Ship: The captain of the Sephora (Archbold may not be his name: the narrator can’t recall exactly)–a coal carrier out of Liverpool, most recently out of Cardiff (Wales), and now 123 days at sea. The ship can only dock during the high spring tides (because otherwise she’ll run aground) and is waiting for them to come into port. The captain has been at sea 37 years, his wife is on board with him. At the time of his appearance in the narrative he’s still shaken up–apparently by the gale that nearly sank the ship and the murder that happened during that gale. “thin red whisker all round his face, and the sort of complexion that goes with hair of that color; also the particular, rather smeary shade of blue in the eyes. He was not exactly a showy figure; his shoulders were high, his stature but middling—one leg slightly more bandy than the other. … A spiritless tenacity was his main characteristic, I judged.”

Plot: A young captain has just taken over a ship. They are awaiting favorable winds to begin the voyage home to Great Britain. Restless, the captain gives the unorthodox command that all hands will retire and he’ll take the first watch. While on watch, he notices that the rope side ladder had not been pulled in. When he attempts to pull it in, he discovers a human form hanging on it. At first he believes he’s found a corpse, presently he discovers a living man a few years younger than himself. This is Leggat, also a Conway man, and the former first mate of the Sephora–the ship anchored far out in the bay which the captain had recently learned about from his own first mate (who’d gained the intelligence from a tugboat captain). Leggat tells the captain his story: a trying gale when all were at wit’s end; an impudent hand talking back; a scuffle between the two; his hands around the scalawag’s neck; the sea spilling over the top of the ship and smashing out his consciousness; and–per the story’s later related to Leggat–his hands still around the now dead man’s neck when they were found smashed up by the forebitt [a post at the ship’s foremast]; also, during that scene, in Leggat’s version, he took command of the situation and had the main sail shortened, which both he and Captain Archbold claimed saved the ship–however, in Archbold’s narration he gave the decisive orders. The captain and crew consider Leggat a murderer and the captain is intent on bringing him to the law (at one point Leggat had asked the captain to leave his door unlocked so he could swim off to some uncivilized island; the captain refuses). Leggat and the very sympathetic narrator (who shows no sign of doubting Leggat’s version–at least not now when he, a much older man, finally finds the time to relate the tale) see the situation more ambiguously. Leggat mentions more than once that he’s a parson’s son, and he claims to be more appalled at the thought that a judge and jury back in England should be given the power to judge his actions–whose circumstances are so completely foreign to them–, than at the noose they’re likely to decide upon.

The bulk of the narration describes the narrator’s difficulties hiding Leggat from his own crew, and then the captain of the Sephora, and then again his own crew. The crew is suspicious almost immediately, and the captain, also almost immediately, identifies so strongly with the man he’s hiding that he half thinks that he’s now been physically doubled and is leading two lives. In the end, he brings the ship dangerously close to shore in order to give his double the best possible chance to make it to shore (to what the captain believes is the Koh-ring island [must be “Koh-Rong”, off the shore of Cambodia, and so still in the Bay of Thailand]). The ship comes dangerously close to running aground, but thanks to the hat that the captain had given his secret friend, and which the friend had let fall into the sea, the captain is able to understand the ship’s relationship to the current well enough to steer her towards safety. Cheers go up from the crew, and all is well: “Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus—yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.”

Style: Classical: Straightforward, with Lots of physical description and psychological asides.

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About the Short Story Game: The idea is to read classic short stories, outline and analyze them, and then write a story response.

Copyright: Andrew Mackenzie Watson 2017, all rights reserved. Please do not reproduce the content of this website without written consent of the copyright holder.